Author Matt Taibbi to speak on his latest book, 'The Divide'

Former Rolling Stone contributing editor and best-selling author Matt Taibbi will join RiverRun Bookstore for a reading and signing.

Former Rolling Stone contributing editor and best-selling author Matt Taibbi will join RiverRun Bookstore for a reading and signing.

Co-sponsored by Seacoast Local as part of the Making the Connection speaker series, the event will take place at 7 p.m. May 2 at the South Church in Portsmouth.

Tickets are $7 and can be used toward the purchase of Taibbi's latest book, "The Divide" (one ticket per copy, please) or $25 and includes a copy of the book. Tickets may be purchased online at www.matttaibbiatriverrun.eventbrite.com, at RiverRun in person, or over the phone.

Taibbi has been a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the author of five previous books, including The New York Times bestsellers "The Great Derangement" and "Griftopia." He lives in New Jersey.

In "The Divide," Taibbi looks back over the last two decades, during which America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world's wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail.

In search of a solution, Taibbi discovered the "Divide," the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends — growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration — come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty.

In "The Divide," Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice — the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse; a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks; and the story of a whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the crosshairs.

On the other side of the "Divide," Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights.

RiverRun co-owner and Manager Tom Holbrook said the Making the Connection speaker series is "all about seeing the big picture here on the Seacoast. Past speakers have included Bill McKibben, Woody Tasch, and Gary Hirschberg."

The store hosts more than 100 events a year and is located at 142 Fleet St. in Portsmouth and 7 Wallingford Square in Kittery, Maine. Call 431-2100 or visit www.riverrunbookstore.com.

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